This blog may take on a new character from now on, because I am entering a new phase in my life. I may not follow the same discipline about frequency or length of post, but the purpose otherwise remains the same.
The new phase started last Friday when my health journey led to a clear diagnosis of a high grade malignant brain tumour, something that can be held at bay for an uncertain time but not cured.
The two night stay in hospital for the repeat biopsy was not comfortable. This time I did not make it to a ward at all owing to a shortage of available beds. Before my procedure, I was parked in various parts of the emergency area, in a crowded service corridor followed by a holding area where space, privacy and peace were minimal. I lucked out after the procedure though, because they left me in post-op overnight, and I discovered that this is the only part of the hospital that does not come alive at 5am, because their patients only start to arrive after 9am. Instead, once others had been cleared away, I had two nurses more or less to myself and would have been able to sleep had I not been pumped up on steroids. My book was a saviour that night.
Then it was no surprise that they packed me off home with indecent haste; we were pleased to exit before 10am, just 16 hours after waking from general anaesthetic and three hours after the devasting news was delivered, thankfully professionally and with due empathy. But it was maybe inevitable that later in the afternoon, with anaesthetic wearing off, medication not fully effective and the stress of many phone calls to close family, I suffered a crisis of phantom symptoms that made me think I would soon be back in ER. Luckily it passed, and now I am fully recovered once again.
Crisis can create miracles, and I am astonished at how much emotional progress my wife and I have been able to make over these recent days. It may have been the saddest week of my life, but in other ways it has been one of the most joyous. We are truly surrounded by love. Facebook has its uses, even if my Meta shares are rapidly becoming worthless (at this point, who the hexck cares?), and I have derived joy from renewed contact from many old friends, all showing great kindness. Strangely, the ones that are driving me to tears tend to be former work colleagues. A bi-product is a torrent of compliments that cannot be good for my inflated ego (once again, who cares?).
I now find many of my thoughts and intentions to revolve around legacy and succession, and I have a series of projects in these areas I find a weird drive to complete. Fortunately, these will play to my strengths.
I love the TV series Succession. The patriarch is so broken and unconfident that he survives only through sadism, usually exercised against his own children, who he breaks in turn while bequeathing all of his worst qualities. The show is somehow funny while also being as dark as could be imagined, and there not the slightest hint of a Hollywood redemption ending. Excellent.
Somehow I seem to have been able to find a diametrically opposite path in many areas of my life. Parenthood is all about giving our children the tools to fly solo and then getting out of the way, and the rewards are the greatest pleasures I know. At work, at one point I managed a team and stumbled into a model by which the primary purpose became to ignite talented careers. Somehow I got away with this for years, and we became very good at it and the reputation ballooned as we went. Many of the team have gone onto truly great things, and the pleasure I can derive from that is almost as great as that of a parent.
If I could offer one piece of advice to most bosses, it would be to get out of the way. Let subordinates develop relationships with your own boss, and let your team manage its own affairs. Set goals but give freedom of method, without constant reporting back to you. It works. And your own life becomes simpler too. But unless you are confident and competent it is hard to find the courage to work this way.
Now I have a series of projects to execute, ranging from some valedictory thoughts to simplifying finances and, most important, trying to help my wife to make good decisions to shape the altered life that she must face. In a way, the timing is lucky, because we were already in a process of planning our transition from the USA back to Europe. Last week I handed over my president responsibilities for our local community choir. It is a relief to have achieved that and to see the choir in such a strong position to thrive. Getting out of the way yields rewards.
These projects share a unique feature, their variable timeline. I have no idea how long I have, so everything is urgent. Every project must reach an optimal closure point every day, recognising that circumstances may necessitate immediate closure at any time. If that point comes quickly, a shaping study and Myers Briggs readout and a check in process are not much use, but the disciplines behind these tools can still help. It is a strange contradiction.
I have been thinking about any parallels from my experience, and the nearest I can come up with is as the last CEO of Norske Fina, after Shell had bought the business and before its final integration into the mother ship. My goal (succession again), was to get out the way as soon as possible, and external actors had incentives to accelerate that timeline to a faster pace than I was comfortable with, so I had to be ready for closure all the time. But we also had useful projects to execute and a business to run. I remember clearly our first Monday morning operations meeting after the merger, trying to refocus a dispirited and distracted management team onto day to day matters like pricing and signing customer deals and bad debts. It was interesting and fun and we made something of a success of it – I had always wanted to be a proper CEO and wasn’t going to waste my fleeting chance.
It is quite good discipline to have the attitude of a best possible closure every single day. This does not mean skipping important steps – a poorly framed project will always fail. Critical items that take time cannot be shirked, even if the consequence may be a small chance that the project does not close at all. So there have to be clear priorities, with focus on those projects where that incomplete outcome would have the most negative consequences.
Most useful, the mindset of daily closure works against procrastination. By forcing a strong daily closure, and then iterating to a better closure on each subsequent day, there is a useful bias towards action and decision, with the comforting backstop that in an iterative world every decision can be changed the next day. A good example of a procrastination tendency is where there is need to resolve something with a life partner. It is wrong to rush in without thought, but almost as bad to put the discussion off until a perfect moment which never arrives. A mindset of best available daily closure is very helpful here, as I can testify based on the things that my wife and I have managed to resolve over the last few days, yet another source of joy.
I cannot really recall how this priority of getting out of the way first came to me, but I am grateful that it did and to anybody who helped me along that path. Facing the ultimate task of getting out of the way, I cannot imagine a more valuable life skill at this point. But the TV show would be much less fun than Succession.
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